Mackbook pro nvidia based video backlight

[Alexander Leidinger]

Quoting Ed Schouten <ed at 80386.nl> (from Thu, 29 Jan 2009 15:36:06 +0100):

> * Alexander Leidinger <Alexander at Leidinger.net> wrote:
>> So you want that either
>>  - a daemon running as root is written which listens to user
>>    requests to set the backlight via sysctl
>> or
>>  - a SUID root program is written that sets the backlight
>>    via sysctl
>> instead of
>>  - a character device with appropriate filesystem permissions
>>    which allows to not go the SUID root or daemon running as
>>    root way
>> ?
>
> Yes. The primary reason is that it is more consistent with the rest of
> the operating system. powerd also uses sysctl's instead of a character
> device, for example.

Powerd does not interact with the user, it is doing automatic power  
management. A backlight on the other hand needs to be adjustable by  
the user.

Normally I would expect some keys on the keyboard to handle this, so  
there should be no need to have some userland stuff, but as I don't  
know about how Apple is doing this, I assume there's some valid reason  
to handle it from userland. But then there needs to be some easy way  
to let an user handle it, even if you are on the console. A separate  
daemon or a SUID root program to control the backlight sounds like  
overkill to me.

> The ideal solution would be to integrate it into vidcontrol, calling
> some kind of ioctl on the TTY/consolectl, but syscons is too brainless
> to know anything about hardware specific features.

Here we are back to what was proposed instead of sysctl. I have to  
admin that I'm confused now about what you propose as a good solution.

Bye,
Alexander.

-- 
If I had any humility I would be perfect.
		-- Ted Turner

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